Simon jumped into the saddle and spurred his palfrey to a trot. Thierry
rode beside him.
"Those two didn't throw anything," Thierry said.
"Of course not." Simon wondered if de Verceuil cared that the Venetians
had shot two innocent men.
When Simon caught up with the procession, de Verceuil was still
furiously scrubbing his face with his pale violet cloak.
"If you had done something sooner about the rioting, this outrage would
not have happened to me," he said, a quaver of anger in his deep voice.
_God help me_, thought Simon. _I could easily grow to hate him. Cardinal
or not._
* * * * *
Word of the shootings must have spread through the city, Simon thought,
because the twisting street leading to the cathedral was nearly empty.
But the piazza in front of Orvieto's cathedral of San Giovenale was
packed with people. Simon's eye was immediately drawn to the top of the
cathedral steps. There stood a white-bearded man wearing a red mantle
over white robes glittering with gold ornament. On his head a tall white
lozenge-shaped miter embroidered with a red and gold cross. In his hand,
a great golden shepherd's crook at least seven feet tall. Simon's mouth
fell open and he held his breath.
The ruler of the whole Catholic Church the world over, the chosen of
God, the anointed of Christ, the heir of Saint Peter. His Holiness,
Urban IV, the pope himself. Simon felt almost as much awe as he had that
day in Paris when King Louis had let him kiss the Crown of Thorns.
_How lucky I am to be here and see this man whom most Christians never
see. It is close as one can come to seeing Jesus Christ Himself._
It looked to Simon as if the Holy Father were glowing with a
supernatural light. To his left and his right stood a dozen or more men
in bright red robes and wide-brimmed red hats with long red tassels
dangling down to their shoulders. The cardinals, the princes of the
Church. Simon wondered if the Tartars realized what honor this did them.
As soon as their sedan chair was set before the pope, the two short
brown men stepped out of it, knelt, and pressed their foreheads to the
cobblestones. They stayed that way until the pope gestured to de
Verceuil, who bent and touched them on the shoulder and raised them up.
The pope turned and, followed by the Tartars and then the cardinals,
proceeded into the cathedral. For this meeting to succeed, a papal mass
was the best possible beginning.
So many people were ahead of Simon that Friar Mathieu caught up with him
before he was able to enter the door of the cathedral.
"What do you think stirred up the crowd like that?" Simon asked as they
pushed through the people standing in the nave of the church.
"In the cities of Italy the mob is always either furious or ecstatic,"
said Friar Mathieu.
"But to defile a cardinal!" Simon said. "That would never happen in
France."
"Italians do not reverence the clergy as much as Frenchmen do," the
Franciscan said with a little smile. "They have had to put up with the
princes of the Church for so long that they are a good deal less awed by
them."
The interior of the cathedral was ablaze with the light of a thousand
candles, but Simon was not impressed by the windows, which were small
and narrow and filled with dull-colored glass. This was an old church,
he thought, remembering the huge windows of many-colored glass in the
newer cathedrals of France.
The crowd was so tightly packed that Simon and Friar Mathieu could not
get to the front of the nave, where chairs had been set before the altar
for dignitaries. They had to be content with standing halfway down the
length of the church. Simon thought wryly that he was getting used to
being pushed into the background. Perhaps he was accepting it too
easily.
Pope Urban, his white hair uncovered, had raised high the round wafer of
bread for the Consecration of the Mass, when an angry shout echoed
through the cathedral.
A chill went through Simon's body, cold as a knife blade. Using his
shoulder as a wedge, he forced his way through the crowd toward the
source of the sound, near the front of the church.
"Ex Tartari furiosi!" the man was shouting in Latin. "Libera nos,
Domine!" _From the fury of the Tartars, Lord deliver us!_ Cries of
dismay rang out near the disturbance, and people began shouting in
Italian.
"Stand aside! Let me through!" Simon shouted. If this were an assassin,
reverence for the mass, even for the pope, must be set aside. Again and
again the shout rose, "Ex Tartari furiosi!" It was harder to move
through the crowd. People were struggling to get away from the man
making the uproar.
Simon stopped, shoved men right and left to make room, and pulled his
scimitar from his scabbard.
People around him turned at the unmistakable rasp of steel on leather, a
sound that so often preceded sudden death. They saw the Saracen sword in
Simon's hands and drew back. As Simon hoped, more people noticed and
fell over one another trying to get out of his way.
Like Moses' rod parting the Red Sea, Simon's scimitar opened a path for
him.
Simon saw a young man with a tangled mass of brown hair whipping about
his face and a brown beard that spread over his chest. He was big and
broad-shouldered, and he wore a plain white robe, ragged and gray with
dirt, and sandals. In one hand he held a dagger.
_Blood of Jesus! He must have come here to kill the Tartars._
Terrified people had opened a circle around the white-robed man, and as
he moved toward the front of the cathedral the open space moved with
him.
"Stop!" Simon cried.
Baring greenish-looking teeth in a snarl, the man swiveled his shaggy
head toward Simon, then immediately rushed at him.
_He's crazy_, Simon thought, a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He crouched, holding his sword out before him, diagonally across his
chest.
"Do not kill him!" boomed a deep voice that Simon recognized as de
Verceuil's.
The man with the dagger hesitated now, just out of reach of Simon's
sword.
_Am I to risk my life to keep this madman alive?_
But de Verceuil's demand made sense. They must try to find out who sent
the man.
Simon took a deep breath. He had practiced sword fighting innumerable
times, but only twice in his life had he come up against an armed man
with a look in his eyes that said he was willing to kill.
_But this is no different from practice_, he told himself.
He feinted to the white-robed man's left, then jumped forward, lifting
his sword high and bringing the flat of it down with all his strength on
the hand that held the dagger. The dagger tumbled through the air. Simon
saw at once that the man had no martial skill.
The madman darted forward in a crouch to retrieve his dagger, and as he
did so Simon kicked him in the chin. The thick beard protected the man's
chin from the full force of Simon's pointed leather boot, but he
staggered. Before the bearded man recovered himself, Alain de Pirenne
charged out of the crowd, seized him in a bear hug, and wrestled him to
the ground.
"Ex Tartari furiosi!" The shouts rang out again and again as the pope's
guards dragged the would-be assassin out of the church.
Simon saw Pope Urban shake his bare white head slowly, then turn back to
the high marble altar and raise the Host overhead once more.
De Verceuil and Friar Mathieu reached Simon at the same time.
The cardinal held out his hand for the dagger, which Simon had
retrieved, and studied it. "One could buy a hundred like it in any
marketplace," he said, keeping his voice low now that the mass had
resumed. He thrust the dagger into his black leather belt with a shrug.
"The white robe and sandals are the mark of the Apostolic Brethren,"
said Friar Mathieu. "Heretics who preach the doctrine of Joachim of
Floris about a coming new age of enlightenment and equality."
"When it comes to heresy," said de Verceuil with an unfriendly grin,
"there is little to choose between the Apostolic Brethren and the
Franciscans. Many of your brethren are secret Joachimites."
"Of course, he might have been dressed that way only to deceive us,"
Friar Mathieu went on, ignoring the insult.
"We will find out who he is and whence he comes," said de Verceuil.
"When we are through with him he will tell us everything. I have ordered
him handed over to the podesta of Orvieto, who will subject him to
questioning in his chamber of torment." He turned on the ball of his
foot, his violet cloak swinging out behind him, and headed back toward
the altar.
_And not a word about my disarming the assassin_, Simon thought angrily.
Friar Mathieu winced and shook his head sadly. "Then again, that man may
not be able to say anything. And the less he can tell us, the more he
will suffer. I pity him."
Simon cringed inwardly at the thought that by capturing the mad heretic
he was the cause of the man's being subjected to horrible tortures. But
greater fears preoccupied him. The Tartars had been in Orvieto only a
few hours, and already the people had been stirred up against them and
they had nearly been assassinated. Somewhere in this town an enemy
lurked, and Simon's body turned cold as he wondered what that enemy
would do next.